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character of Corydon

stock character, a rustic or lovesick youth. The name appears notably in Virgil’s
Eclogues, a collection of 10 unconnected pastoral poems composed between 42 and 37
bce. In the second eclogue, the shepherd Corydon bewails his unrequited love for the boy Alexis. In the seventh, Corydon and Thyrsis, two Arcadian herdsmen, engage in a singing match. The name Corydon was also used by...

development of Latin literature

Virgil, born near Mantua and schooled at Cremona and Milan, chose Theocritus as his first model. The self-consciously beautiful cadences of the
Eclogues depict shepherds living in a landscape half real, half fantastic; these allusive poems hover between the actual and the artificial. They are shot through with topical allusions, and in the fourth he already appears as a national prophet....

discussed in biography

...may have survived in a collection of poems attributed to him and known as the
Appendix Vergiliana, but it is unlikely that many of these are genuine. His earliest certain work is the
Eclogues, a collection of 10 pastoral poems composed between 42 and 37
bce. Some of them are escapist, literary excursions to the idyllic pastoral world of Arcadia based on the Greek poet...

influence on Calpurnius Siculus

...in praise of Nero and his age. The pastoral frame of the poems is the background for allegory, which consists not only of hints about contemporary politics, as in Virgil’s
Eclogues, but also of detailed yet hidden references to actual historical figures. Only an inner circle would have been able to understand all the references, though the propaganda is explicit...

inspired by Theocritus

...of Theocritus’s works. They introduced the pastoral setting in which shepherds wooed nymphs and shepherdesses and held singing contests with their rivals. They were the sources of Virgil’s
Eclogues and much of the poetry and drama of the Renaissance and were the ancestors of the famous English pastoral elegies, John Milton’s “Lycidas,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s...

interpretation as Christian allegory

...in the second half of Virgil’s Latin epic,
Aeneid, fought bloody battles) was seen as a type in a system of hidden Christianity. Virgil’s fourth
Eclogue, a prophetic vision of the birth of a child who would usher in the “golden age,” was read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Seen by many Christian commentators as the...

Middle Eastern literature

...an important source for ancient Middle Eastern religion. The Roman historian Livy wrote many descriptions of religious rites of the ancient Middle East. The Roman poet Virgil’s
Aeneid and
Eclogues reflect Egyptian, Semitic, and Anatolian, as well as Greek, antecedents. The Greek biographer Plutarch’s
De Iside et Osiride (“Concerning Isis and Osiris”) is still...